This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

Somewhere back in the introduction, I mentioned that I would be basing a great deal of the desktop on KDE version 3 (both 3.0 and 3.1). From the Linux installation perspective, this implies that you are planning to run a modern Linux distribution and not some disks you've had lying around for the last three years. An up-to-date release of your favorite
distribution, whether it is Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, or something else is essential.

A modern Linux installation is easy. I will go so far as to say that it is even easier than installing Windows. For the most
part, you boot from your CD-ROM drive, click Next a few times and you are running Linux. Okay, perhaps there is a bit more to it than that, but not much. Linux will, for the
most part, auto-detect nearly all devices on your machine and automatically configure things optimally.

Getting Ready for Your Installation

If your machine has Windows already, installed and you have documents, spreadsheets, pictures, or music files that you wish
to keep, now would be a good time to back those things up, either on diskette or burned to a CD-ROM. Even if you plan on preserving
your Windows installation for a dual-boot system, it's always prudent to have a good backup if you are going to be doing major
work on your hard disk. You might also want to take advantage of all the hard work that was done in pre-installing Windows
and make notes on all the hardware in your machine—the type of network and video cards and anything else you can think of.
You do that by clicking the Start button, selecting Settings, Control Panel, then double-clicking the System icon. Now walk
through the hardware profiles and take some notes. Odds are you won't need it at all, but you can never have too much information.

The average Linux installation takes about 30-60 minutes, although I have seen it take as little as 5 minutes on a really
fast system. That's a fully network-ready, configured, all-set-to-work machine with no rebooting every few minutes to load
another driver. It doesn't get much easier than this.

That said, unless you are feeling particularly adventurous, I would highly recommend that you read through this chapter once
before actually starting.